the mellow tigger's musings

Today, after work, I played a demo for game on Steam. It's called Tiny Bookshop. Surprisingly, it has a native Linux version, so I didn't even have to turn on Proton for it to run on my computer. It plays well with keyboard/mouse, but it looks like it would do great on the Steam Deck too.

Instead of a little free library (paging threemeninaboat), you manage a tiny for-profit bookstore. Your store is on a trailer behind your car. Each day, you read the newspaper to buy new inventory or items. The events you read about in the newspaper might convince you to visit a different location in town the next day to sell more books. The items you buy can boost or reduce sales of different genres of books, and you decorate both inside and outside your tiny bookshop. There's a journal that automatically records important details for you, which helps you keep track of things like which city locations sell which book genres more frequently.

Visitors to your tiny bookshop sometimes ask for your help to find a book. They describe what they're looking for. You click on each book on your shelf (genres are color-coded, so you don't have to click every book in the store) to find if something matches. If you find a great match and recommend it to them, you can even get a big boost for all sales that day. If not, they'll come back another day, and you can try to stock something overnight that might work better for them.

The free demo version of the game lets you play only 2 game days, then it ends. But that's plenty of time to see some of the mechanics in use in the game. I think the whole thing is nice. I found it enjoyable and... quaint? It's nice to play games that are entirely non-combat. It's 10% off from regular price on Steam right now, thanks to the Wholesome Games sales now through August 14th.

I'm playing a lot of the Pantheon MMO in my spare time. It is still years away from being complete, but there's more than enough to keep me entertained. I keep creating (and sometimes deleting then recreating) new characters to try out all of the different character classes and tradeskills. So far, my highest-progressing characters are shaman, wizard, and ranger. That experimentation process leads me to today's question.

My next character class will be a necromancer. In this game, they can perform an unusual and much-needed service called corpse summoning. When any player's character dies, they leave behind a visible corpse in the game world, still containing all of their character inventory. The player must return to that corpse to retrieve the money and items they carried at the time of their death. That's fine if the corpse is in a convenient location. If not... then corpse summoning is essential. A necromancer can target the currently-living character (respawned in town or other safe location) and magically teleport their distant corpse to them, where they conveniently retrieve all of their lost items.

For my necromancer, I want to learn the tradeskills of 1) carpentry for creation of bank boxes for large storage space which I have decided to call "coffins" and 2) provisioning for creation of meals and drinks which I will call "funeral gifts". So... I need a name that alludes either to "happy" funeral meals amongst the living or to those meals that are delivered with the dead into their tomb. I've been looking through pages about the times from modern practices back to ancient Egypt. So far, nothing stands out as a useful word for these offerings. At some point, I ran across the Latin silicernium, but I'm just not fond of it as a character name.

Are there any language aficionados out there who might know of a word that fulfills this description? I want to summon corpses for people in need, then afterwards hand them food and a bank storage box, saying something like: "Please accept this coffin and funerary meal. We wish the recently departed good luck and safe journey." I'm not even on a roleplay server, but some people do actually roleplay here. I'd just get a kick out of playing a good guide-to-the-afterlife, I think, rather than the expected evil death magician.

But I just can't figure out a character name yet.

Happy winter solstice 2024. From here, the days start getting longer again. I feel like we're all going to need the "good news" where we can find it in 2025.

I've mentioned the Timberborn game a few times over the years. It's still in early access, but I'm looking forward to its official release soon. I'll leave you with this holiday greeting from their recent patch notes.